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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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Mary Catherine Bateson
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: December 8
Died: 2021
Died: January 2
Anthropologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Mary C. Bateson
Defined
Solutions
Depends
Problems
Upon
Often
Problem
Depend

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Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
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When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.
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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
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Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Improvisation and new learning are not private processes they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson